🍁 September Dispatch: On labour, the spider, and who we’ve always been.
I originally had planned to write a passage on the six kinds of time I experience for this newsletter. Ironically, today being Labor Day, I realized it’s not time for that yet. Perhaps next month…
🤸🏾 Not work or play, but a secret third thing.
If you are a cook at a restaurant, and you make a meal, that is clearly work.
If you offer to cook a meal for sick friend, and bring it to them, perhaps that feels less like work, even though it is clearly labour.
If your friend comes over, and you cook a meal together to pass the time… that no longer feels like work, does it? If the cooking of a meal could just as easily be traded for drinks at a bar or a board game or any number of other pastimes; the things we do incidentally while we connect with each other.
That could very well feel like play.
But truthfully, the distinction is meaninglessly modern. In any tribal scenario — from the campfire to the city — communities of people will often gather. And in the gathering, there are things that need to get done. But the experience of being in community is that of communing, around activities that may be fun or arduous or pleasurable or challenging or all or none of the above. And at the end of the day, what must be done gets done, without a thought to whether the doing of that was “work” or “play” or indeed “rest”.
This says to me that there is a category of actions to which work, play and rest belong. In the same way that circle, squares, and triangles are a kind of “shape”, work, play, and rest must be a kind of……
And my English fails me here, because I can’t find the word. But it feels vital to be able to point to that concept, in a time when so much is demanded of us, and despite the efforts of the labour movement (”8 hours for work! 8 hours for rest! 8 hours for what you will!”) we don’t seem to have much time for anything, let alone the necessary [WORD NOT FOUND] of fighting fascism and remaking society.
There is a thing humans do together, in the same way that a spider spins a web, whereby the world is purposefully and joyfully changed — and if you can find the word for it I’d love to hear it.
🕷️ The spider…
That whole thought was sparked when went camping a few weeks back, and I found myself thinking way too hard about a spiderweb:
A spider builds her web between branches, over trees, and across paths. And as often as not, some deer, elk, or bear will walk through the web, destroying it utterly.
It would be easy to ascribe a human emotion to this sisyphean truth, that a web is no sooner created than destroyed, and lament the futility of the spider’s endeavors.
But a spider does not build her web to last forever. She builds it to catch flies.
Even more to the point, if she were to lay down her spinner and stop building webs simply because of the inevitability of their destruction, she would starve.
Not everything we build is meant to last forever. Indeed, some of the most important things we build are all the more important because they won’t.
📻 …and catching up with ourselves
Worlds Beyond Number just finished the first book of The Wizard, The Witch, and the Wild One. I’m truly blown away by the depth of thought, heart, storytelling, philosophy, music, and sheer audacity this team has put into telling truly one of the most compelling stories of our time.
(Seriously — it not just “good for actual play.” It deserves a Hugo nomination. If you want a modern version of what listening to old-time radio serials must have felt like as a ragtag trio discovers within themselves the power to fight fascism, strap in.
In one of the most momentous moments of the campaign, a character levels up, finally taking their oath as a paladin. In that moment, as this character steps into an understanding of themselves after a long, arduous journey. the narration says:
To even become aware of who you really are is a form of change—maybe the most potent, because it’s not really a transformation. The greatest change is actually catching up with yourself; realizing who you’ve been.
Can you remember a time where you "caught up to yourself" like that? I'd love to hear about it.
🌱 Futurefull
The Futurefull team is growing — welcome Aetherius Bordeaux! A phenomenal actual play performer in his own right, he’ll be helping us put together our events as we grow this community. Join the waitlist to keep an ear out this fall and winter as we keep building.
⚡️ Reckless Magic
I can’t say much about the Reckless Magic client I’m currently working with, except to say that I’m excited to help launch something this beautiful, bold, and Black this Fall. In the meantime, I’m still booking for Winter ‘25, so if you’d like to work with me, hit me up!
🐸 And finally…
Tell me why this frog statue we saw at the Morris Arboretum looks exactly like John Noble:
